Ken Livingstone, in full Kenneth Robert Livingstone
(born June 17, 1945, Lambeth, London, England), British politician, who made constitutional history on May 4, 2000, when he was elected mayor of London—the first time that British voters had directly elected a candidate to an executive office at any level of government. He served as mayor until May 2008.

Livingstone was born in Lambeth, an inner London borough. He left school at age 17 and started work as a laboratory technician. By his early 20s he was an active Labour Party member. He was elected to the Lambeth Borough Council in 1971 and to the Greater London Council (GLC) in 1973. Between 1977 and 1981, when the GLC was run by members of the Conservative Party, Livingstone led a left-wing faction within Labour’s group in the GLC. In the GLC elections of May 1981, Labour won a majority. Livingstone immediately challenged the party’s moderate GLC leader, Andrew McIntosh, who had led the party to victory. Backed by a majority of Labour GLC councillors, Livingstone took over the running of the council.

Margaret Thatcher, then Britain’s Conservative prime minister, was appalled by the left-wing domination of a number of cities, including London. She took action when Livingstone, popularly dubbed “Red Ken,” sought to intervene in national controversies (for example, by inviting to London leading members of Sinn Féin, the Irish Republican Army’s political wing). Thatcher abolished the big metropolitan councils, including the GLC. She achieved her goal in 1986 but at the price of turning Livingstone into a political martyr.

The highlight of Livingstone’s first term was a controversial fee-based traffic management plan that was designed to reduce congestion in central London. While critics decried the scheme as simply another tax, an increase in commercial traffic and a booming city economy earned Livingstone praise from business groups. He was readmitted to the Labour Party in 2004 and was reelected mayor later that year. Even his detractors applauded his leadership in both the successful campaign to secure the 2012 Olympic Games for London and his response to the July 7, 2005, terrorist attacks on the city’s transit system. In 2006 Livingstone was suspended for a month after comparing a reporter to a concentration camp guard; he later successfully appealed the decision to the High Court. In the 2008 elections he was defeated in his bid for a third term as mayor by Boris Johnson of the Conservative Party. Livingstone challenged Johnson again in the 2012 mayoral election, but he came up short after an acrimonious campaign between the two “big personalities” that the British media dubbed “The Boris and Ken Show.”

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